Сергей Огольцов - The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)

Natasha, Sasha, Irochka, and Valerik, their eyes rounded by fright, crowded in the doorway between the kitchen and the room where Father and Uncle Tolik were sitting with their silent sullen stares stuck to the TV box…

That’s how I committed the second meanness in my life – slandered innocent Aunt by my false accusations. And though her response to my questioning I got exactly the way as related to Mother, yet after the Aunt’s interpretation, I could agree that, yes, so was her answer, however, I never admitted my base calumny.

That lying without words filled me with compunction because the quarrel in the khutta was my fault. I felt guilty before both Aunt Lyouda and her kids, and before Mother, who I belied, and before everyone because I was such a sissy dishrag, “Woe is me! I’m left alone in the whole world!” My contrition was never voiced though because we were not bred up to make apologies. True, at times they could be heard in movies, but for real life, when inadvertently you had someone pushed, run into or stuff, “Excuse me for not trying harder!” was enough.

All that annoyance about nothing triggered off a slow, inconspicuous, process of my alienation and transformation into a “cut off slice” as Father used to say. I began to live a separate life of my own although, of course, I did not realize or felt anything of the kind and just lived that way…

~ ~ ~

Mother and Aunt Lyouda made up rather soon, after Aunt Lyouda showed Mother how to correctly sing the popular at that time “ Cheremshina blossoms everywhere”, besides, she was bringing from her work the chow you couldn’t buy anywhere because at any store any goods beyond the pretty niggardly scope of staples were sold exclusively under the counter to the circle of trusted people: the kindred of salespersons and those who could potentially scratch your back in answer…

Aunt Lyouda’s tales about the midday-meal break at their deli were so funny!. After they latched the shop entrance for the midday break, the saleswomen gathered in their locker room and started their show of delicatessens brought that day from home in their half-liter glass jars. They were comparing, exchanging comments and judgments, evaluating the appeal, sharing their recipes.

The store manager ate separately in her office and when the telephone on her desk rang, she answered the call and hollered thru the open door who was wanted. The woman in question would hurriedly travel from the locker room to the manager’s office and back but—however short and hurried the phone talk—her jar content, by her return, was heavily reduced by cluster degustation. Everyone too eager to see the taste. One lick is better than a hundred looks, right?.

Yet, there is one foxy bitch at the store. Whenever called by the manager to the phone, she calmly sets her spoon aside, deliberately clears her throat with a “ khirk !”, and spits into her jar. Yahk! After the procedure, in no haste of any kind, she leaves the locker room for the pending conversation and never looks back at the rest of the saleswomen with their interest in her jar lost irreparably…

Mother also started working in the trade, she got a cashier job in the large Deli 6 near the Station. However, two months later she had a major shortage there. Mother was very worried and kept repeating she couldn’t make so vast a mistake. Someone from the deli workers should have knocked out a check for a large sum when Mother went to the toilet forgetful to lock the cash register. Selling of Father’s coat of natural leather, which he bought when working at the Object, helped out of the pickle. After that Mother worked in retail outlets manned by a single salesperson, herself, without any suspicious colleagues, at one or another stall in the Central Park of Recreation by Peace Square where they sold wine, biscuits, cigarettes and draft beer….

End summer there again was a squabble in our khutta , though this time not a sisterly quarrel but a scrap between a husband and his wife. The source for discontent became the newspaper-wrapped mushrooms which Uncle Tolik brought from a ride to the forest. Not a remarkably big harvest, they still would do for a pot of soup.

The insidious newspaper package was accurately cinched and put by unsuspecting Uncle Tolik into the mesh-bag which he hung on his motorbike steer not to scatter the mushrooms on the way. However, at home instead of grateful praise, he got a shrill tongue-lashing from Aunt Lyouda, who discovered that the string used for cinching was a brassiere shoulder strap. In vain Uncle Tolik repeatedly declared that he had just picked up “the damn scrap of a string” in the forest, Aunt Lyouda responded with louder and louder assertions that she was not born the day before and let them show her a forest where bras grew in bushes, and there's no use of trying to make a fool of her… Grandma Katya no longer tried to appease the quarrelers and only looked around with saddened eyes.

(And that became a lesson for 2 at once – Uncle Tolik learned to never bring home any mushrooms and I grasped the meaning of “bra strap”.)

But Aunt Lyouda, on the spur of the moment, let herself a try at forbidding even the Uncle Tolik’s fishing rides, at which point it was he who raise his voice until they reached a compromise: he was allowed to go fishing under the condition of my going along. So, the following 2 or 3 years from spring to autumn every weekend with a pair of fishing rods and a spinner hitched to the trunk rack of his “Jawa” we set off to fishing.

Mostly we rode to the river of Seim. At times we fished in the Desna river, but then we had to start off at dark because it was a seventy-kilometer ride there… Shooting ahead before the roar of its own engine, charged “Jawa” thru the city submerged in its night repose, the streets empty and free of anything including the State Traffic Control militia… Then, after the thirty-kilometer-long ride along Baturin highway, we got to the even asphalt of Moscow freeway where Uncle Tolik sometimes squeezed out of his made in Czech-Slovakia motorbike a hundred and twenty kilometers per hour…

When we turned off onto the field roads, the dawn was gradually catching up “Jawa”. I sat behind, grabbing Uncle Tolik by sides with my hands stuck in the pockets of his motorcyclist jacket of artificial leather so that they wouldn’t freeze away in the chilly headwind. The night around little by little transformed into twilight with the darker stretches of windbreak belts showing up about the fields, the sky grew lighter, showed ragged shreds of clouds in their transition from white to pink glad to feel the touches of sky-long sun rays sent beforehand from beyond the horizon…The breathtaking views stirred thrill intense no less than by wild-flight riding…

Our usual bait was worms dug in the kitchen garden but one time the fishermen-gurus advised Uncle Tolik to try dragonfly larvae. Those critters live underwater in clumps of clay by the higher river bank, and the fish just go crazy about them, like, snapping the larva-rigged hook from each other…

We drove up to the riverbank amid murky twilight. “Java” coughed out its last breath and stopped. The river lapped sleepily, wrapped in thin wisps of fog rising from the water. Uncle Tolik explained that it was me who had to fetch those lumps of clay onto the bank. A mere thought of entering that dark water in the dusk of still lingering night threw a shiver up the spine, but a good ride deserved a good dive. I undressed and, on the advice of the elder, took a headlong dive into the river.

Wow! As it turned out, the water was much warmer than the damp morning chill on the bank! I dragged slippery lumps out of the river and Uncle Tolik broke them ashore to pick the larvae out from the tunnels drilled by them for living in clay. When he said it was enough I even didn’t want to leave the engulfing warmth of the stream…